That footage is incredible. I so wish we'd had something like that for MSL! NASA needs to get it into their heads that the public need to actually see is happening in order to get them interested in what's going on!

Unfortunately, despite the great imagery from the Chang'e 3 mission, the public is very unaware of what's happening. Poor media coverage and bad timing (Mandela's funeral taking the headlines) are among the reasons. However, I suspect and fear that there is another reason: very few people care about space travel, Moon landings and so on.

I highly doubt that. The general SpaceX and Grasshopper launches get more response and coverage than this Moon landing got I think. American public is excited about Americans doing things. The general public thinks of China as the country that makes all the plastic toys.

.. and there's nothing wrong with that. A number of people I know have been unsatisfied as the goals are unquestionably propaganda "national pride" and "science". My question to them is: why you gotta act like no-one cares about that stuff, just because you don't?

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Jeff Bezos has billions to spend on rockets and can go at whatever pace he likes! Wow! What pace is he going at? Well... have you heard of Zeno's paradox?

I was beginning to wonder whether I would ever see a return to the lunar surface. I am the opposite of underwhelmed. When I watched the live broadcast I had tears in my eyes.

My dad saw the landings live, but I never did. I grew up hearing about it all the time. I'm rather surprised at the outpouring of emotion thats been going on in this topic considering its a rover, and its just the Moon. Rover on Mars, yes exciting. People ANYWHERE, definitely exciting. Awesome pictures of the Moon, yes exciting. Poor images of the moon, not so much.

We've been getting great imagery from LRO and Kaguya of late so this is all rather, well, dull. I had no emotional response to this at all.

It's great that you can share how underwhelmed and unimpressed you are with this, but some of us do find it interesting.

I was beginning to wonder whether I would ever see a return to the lunar surface. I am the opposite of underwhelmed. When I watched the live broadcast I had tears in my eyes.

My dad saw the landings live, but I never did. I grew up hearing about it all the time. I'm rather surprised at the outpouring of emotion thats been going on in this topic considering its a rover, and its just the Moon. Rover on Mars, yes exciting. People ANYWHERE, definitely exciting. Awesome pictures of the Moon, yes exciting. Poor images of the moon, not so much.

We've been getting great imagery from LRO and Kaguya of late so this is all rather, well, dull. I had no emotional response to this at all.

The engineering excellence associated with all elements of this type of mission is almost beyond words.Getting to witness almost all of it in near real time was/is a space nerds dream!I can only speak for myself but I felt so happy for all of the Chinese people and engineers!If you have ever seen the film "In the Shadow of the Moon", Mike Collins says that when the crew of Apollo 11 went on its world tour after the success of their mission...they were greeted (the world over) with comments of "we did it"...as if the people of the world vicariously accomplished what the Americans had done with the landing.I cant help but feel the same way with this landing. It really is a triumph of the people of Earth if you can get a little philosophical about it!

One thing I don't see is a color reference plaque to aid in color correction and white balance of the images, like we see on the Mars landers. One red flag doesn't help much.

When we say colour calibration... what exactly are we going for? To mimic how something will look to the human eye? How is that objective? Also, apart from sensor drift, and different electronic noise etc. - what optical difference exists between the Earth and the moon environment that requires re-calibration once on the moon? A moonwalker would also face these different optical conditions (outside of his helmet i.e.) too .... so are we really calibrating, or distorting?

The sunward solar panel on Yutu is tilted down. Have we read if this is an error in deployment or is it an an active controlled measure to maximize electric power generation or optimize the thermal environment for the rover?

Looking at the position of the shadow of the rover on the surface makes me think that the array on the right of the picture was tilted to make the plane normal to solar angle of incidence..? The screengrab of the lander's solar panels from this post, seems to depict similar tracking ability.

The array on the left of the Yutu pic is relatively flat though.. maybe, unlike the lander, the panels on the rover only have a 90 deg range of motion?

Talking of Chang'e 4, will that be that launched on the same launcher as this one or are they going to put it one of their new launchers? Afterall to do sample recovery I would think they'll need a higher capacity launcher.

No, Chang'e-4 is going to be copy HW of CH'e-3 including LV, with mission goals more focussed on science compare to Ch'e-3 which is more technology demonstration mission.Sample return missions will be then Chang'e-4 and Chang'e-5.

I had heard that Change'e 4 was the backup to 3, therefore I thought it would be used to test out a new launcher?

(Reuters) - China aims to launch its next unmanned lunar probe in 2017, with the key aim of collecting and bringing back lunar samples, an official said on Monday, after the country's first probe landed successfully on the moon over the weekend.The development of the Chang'e 5 probe, tasked with the moon sampling mission, is well underway and it is expected to be launched around 2017, a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said.

Note that a couple days ago there were some possibly misreported stories about Chang'e 5 being put on hold or delayed.

Another note, in the morning CCTV live coverage there was a segment with Indian space jouranlists, who mentioned that Chandrayaan-2 could fly in a "year or two", although written reports all refer to "about three years from now"

I was beginning to wonder whether I would ever see a return to the lunar surface. I am the opposite of underwhelmed. When I watched the live broadcast I had tears in my eyes.

My dad saw the landings live, but I never did. I grew up hearing about it all the time. I'm rather surprised at the outpouring of emotion thats been going on in this topic considering its a rover, and its just the Moon. Rover on Mars, yes exciting. People ANYWHERE, definitely exciting. Awesome pictures of the Moon, yes exciting. Poor images of the moon, not so much.

We've been getting great imagery from LRO and Kaguya of late so this is all rather, well, dull. I had no emotional response to this at all.

As others have said, thanks for sharing.

I remember Luna 9, Surveyor, Apollo, Lunokhod. The sample return missions. This fills me with the same excitement.

Orbiters are useful, interesting and all, but there is nothing like getting down and dirty on the lunar surface (or any other planet for that matter). We haven't seen that since 1976.

Poor images of the Moon? You must be joking!

And who would have thought in 1976 that the next time we landed on the Moon it would be a Chinese mission, and we would see it live?

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"There is nobody who is a bigger fan of sending robots to Mars than me... But I believe firmly that the best, the most comprehensive, the most successful exploration will be done by humans" Steve Squyres

One thing I don't see is a color reference plaque to aid in color correction and white balance of the images, like we see on the Mars landers. One red flag doesn't help much.

When we say colour calibration... what exactly are we going for? To mimic how something will look to the human eye? How is that objective? Also, apart from sensor drift, and different electronic noise etc. - what optical difference exists between the Earth and the moon environment that requires re-calibration once on the moon? A moonwalker would also face these different optical conditions (outside of his helmet i.e.) too .... so are we really calibrating, or distorting?

Colour calibration is essential to extract the maximum scientific information from images. Which is why they are usually carried. I would be very surprised if Chang'e 3 and Yutu don't have them, we just may not have seen them yet.

« Last Edit: 12/16/2013 10:00 AM by Dalhousie »

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"There is nobody who is a bigger fan of sending robots to Mars than me... But I believe firmly that the best, the most comprehensive, the most successful exploration will be done by humans" Steve Squyres

One thing I don't see is a color reference plaque to aid in color correction and white balance of the images, like we see on the Mars landers. One red flag doesn't help much.

When we say colour calibration... what exactly are we going for? To mimic how something will look to the human eye? How is that objective? Also, apart from sensor drift, and different electronic noise etc. - what optical difference exists between the Earth and the moon environment that requires re-calibration once on the moon? A moonwalker would also face these different optical conditions (outside of his helmet i.e.) too .... so are we really calibrating, or distorting?

The difference between Earth and the Moon is that the light curves are significantly shifted by the filtering of the atmosphere. What is "white" on Earth under natural light would not be white under direct unfiltered sunlight.

And indeed, their mast cam and high gain antenna are on the same pan unit

What are the advantages of this configuration?

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"There is nobody who is a bigger fan of sending robots to Mars than me... But I believe firmly that the best, the most comprehensive, the most successful exploration will be done by humans" Steve Squyres

What's always difficult with Moon landing videos (i.e. also the same with Apollo vids) is how hard it is to get a sense of altitude above the ground. Seeing the horizon helps somewhat, but I think its curvature is exaggerated by the camera lens.As the lander gets closer and closer to the lunar surface, more and more craters appear that look just like the bigger craters seen from higher up, so it's like a never-ending fractal image.

I wouldn't call what we're seeing "great" imagery honestly. It's great as compared to Apollo, because you're comparing modern technology to analog color wheel 10 fps footage. I'm still waiting for proper releases of the video footage not from poor TV screencaps after multiple bad digital re-encodes.

You seem to seeing different images to me. The video and photos I have seen have been excellent.

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This is a failure of the Chinese government IMO.

Sounds like an agenda to me. Methodologically rather like the Apollo or Mars hoax or people. Set up an arbitrary standard of what you would do if you were CNSA/NASA and then, when they don't to this, they have "failed".

The Chinese have not failed just because they are not dancing to your expectations.

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"There is nobody who is a bigger fan of sending robots to Mars than me... But I believe firmly that the best, the most comprehensive, the most successful exploration will be done by humans" Steve Squyres